Those are some loaded questions: Is it a problem that your wife has to get intoxicated to enjoy sex with you, or should you be delighted she’s willing to get intoxicated to have sex with you? From your account, your wife was never that interested in sex, and so you are one of those couples who decided to pair up despite your mismatched libidos. I do wonder about people who think love will overcome this problem, because surely everyone knows marriage and kids rarely heat up things. I have suggested scheduling sex, which doesn’t sound sexy, but having sex turns out to be more sexy than not having it. In most of these cases, though, the partners have established that they enjoy each other in bed—they’re just not getting there often enough. I think you need to get to the primary source of your wife’s resistance. Is it more that she lies there thinking: “I’ve got to make appointments for the kids’ vaccinations tomorrow. Are we out of bread? Olivia has a recital Thursday afternoon, so I have to arrange to leave work early …”? That is, her domestic life has subsumed her erotic life, and instead of sex being a release, it just feels like another obligation. Or is she saying to herself, “I hate when he touches my nipples. I hate when he kisses my neck. I hate when he wants me to stroke his …” This inquiry into your wife’s feelings needs to be sensitive, even oblique. So I suggest you start by reading Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel and The Return of Desire by Gina Ogden.

See if these books offer insights or case histories that speak to your situation. If you find these, you can ask your wife to look at some passages. Or you can just act on what you’ve read, taking a page from other semi-moribund couples who have been jolted into bed. Since you applied my suggestion about scheduling sex, I’m going to make another one that I can’t even believe I’m advocating. Consider taking a trip together to Colorado or Washington state. For one thing, when the children are far away with their grandparents or a trusted babysitter, your wife won’t be distracted about the need to make their lunches. For another, you two can explore the new world of legal marijuana. To get aroused your wife has to shut off the competing voices in her head. So join with her and share a joint. Because this letting go will be somewhat subversive, I hope it gets you two laughing your heads off and tearing your clothes off. No, I don’t think becoming potheads is a permanent solution. I’m just suggesting that casting aside your routines and responsibilities might be a way to create some new sparks.

GGG stands for “good, giving, and game,” which is what we should all strive to be for our sex partners. Think “good in bed,” “giving equal time and equal pleasure,” and “game for anything—within reason.”

Brian Brown, the head of the National Organization for Marriage, publicly challenged me to a debate in the wake of Bullshitgate. Brown said he would debate me “anytime, anywhere.” Brown expected, no doubt, that I would pack a hall with hooting, hollering supporters of marriage equality who would boo and shout him down. (Which was probably what he was after—it would’ve allowed Brown to play the victim and complain about hypocritical, intolerant liberals.) Instead I invited Brown and his wife to come to dinner at my house and meet my husband and son. No booing crowd, no grandstanding. Dinner. I would have to acknowledge Brown’s humanity by extending my hospitality, he would have to acknowledge mine by accepting my hospitality. …

It looks like I’m gonna have to clear all the Catholic kitsch out of our living room and dining room—my 5′ plaster Jesus, our 3′ plaster Mary, all my other plaster saints, the dozens of rosaries hanging around their plaster necks, the stack of disintegrating hymnals on the mantle, etc.

Dan Savage, creator of the It Gets Better Project, was invited to speak as a keynote speaker at NSPA/ JEA’s annual High School Journalism convention, Journalism on the Edge.

During a speech at a high school journalism convention, Dan Savage attacked anti-gay Biblical literalism, which caused some Christian students to walk out.

Perhaps they should have stayed. As Dan Savage explains after the predictable outrage ensued:

I was not attacking the faith in which I was raised. I was attacking the argument that gay people must be discriminated against—and anti-bullying programs that address anti-gay bullying should be blocked (or exceptions should be made for bullying “motivated by faith”)—because it says right there in the Bible that being gay is wrong. Yet the same people who make that claim choose to ignore what the Bible has to say about a great deal else. I did not attack Christianity. I attacked hypocrisy. My remarks can only be read as an attack on all Christians if you believe that all Christians are hypocrites. Which I don’t believe.

People keep wondering why I post about marriage equality. All sorts of accusations are hurled…fingers are pointed…they ask how can I as a Christian support same sex marriage? How can I as a Christian even entertain treating homosexuals equally?

Well it is true, I was once a bigot…but in my learning and growing as a Christian I found that we are all equal…as sinners…before God…and that we can all be saved, no matter what. Once I learned that one powerful lesson you then also learn that bigotry is pointless, hurtful, and I believe against all that Jesus taught us.

Dan Savage has pointed me to a video, it is long (1 hour), but well worth it:

Matthew Vines is a young gay man who grew up in Kansas. His family is Christian and very conservative. After coming out, Vines took two years off college to research and think deeply about what the bible says—and doesn’t say—about homosexuality. You could argue that what Vines has to say is irrelevant to non-Christians. But Vines’ argument and his insights are highly relevant to gay Christians, to their families, to Christians who point to the bible to justify their bigotry and the pain they inflict on LGBT people (including their own LGBT children), and to anyone who happens to live in a country that is majority Christian. Vines delivered these remarks at College Hill United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kansas, earlier this month. Watch this video: Vines is brilliant. He has a post up at Huffington Post that gives some context and background. Go read it.

I’ve have been described previously as “a nasty bastard“, amongst other unrepeatable things. I have seen politicians cross roads and crowded halls to avoid having to speak to me and National doesn’t even want me as a member.

If you don’t want people to say mean things about you, don’t go into politics (or blogging). And when they do (and they will) it is never smart to whine about the mean mean meanies who are so mean to you. Not only will you gain no sympathy or new support, but then everyone will be repeating all those mean things and chuckling.

But former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. And he had been the subject of a cruel (but well deserved) prank for a very long time.

After Santorum’s vile statement in 2003 in which he discussed his support for anti-gay sodomy laws in terms of bestiality and incest, Dan Savage decided to have a little fun. He held a contest for a new definition for “santorum” and the winner was:

The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

A Spreading Santorum webpage was set up for tracking the extent to which the new definition could be detected in culture and it was clever enough that it drew web traffic placing it as the first listing when “santorum” was googled. And so there it sat as the first result through the rest of Rick Santorum’s term as Senator and his failed reelection bid.

Outstanding. I think I have found a new blogging mentor.

But with his presidential campaign, there was a pretty good chance that eventually “Rick Santorum for President” along with news articles about the campaign would have gotten the traffic necessary to push the aging joke off of the front page. And it likely would have, were it not for the actions of two people.

First, Savage encouraged his readers to go back and select the link to keep it active in the Google search matrices. Enough responded to keep Savage’s santorum link in place ahead of the candidate’s page. In fact, the campaign site was fourth, after a Wikipedia article and another site’s reference to Savage’s definition.

But the real boost to Spreading Santorum came from none other than Rick Santorum himself. On July 18 he went on a radio show to complain about the way he was being mistreated by Savage and in addition to some recent comments also noted the website. And then someone with a whole lot of hero worship and no political sense must have advised the next move: Santorum sent out afund raising letter with the following sentence:

Remember this is not the first time Savage has attacked us on our stance of supporting American values. Savage and his perverted sense of humor is the reason why my children cannot Google their father’s name.

And when this letter was published on Politico on July 20, which turned into articles in the media, just what do you suppose that people did? Obviously they set out to find out why you couldn’t google “Santorum”.

But July 22, the presidential campaign link had dropped to eighth place behind:

The campaign site has now moved back up into sixth place. But Savage is goading Rick Santorum, threatening to make his first name into a vulgar word as well. I guess now we’ll have to wait and see if Sen. Santorum is so very incredibly stupid that he bites at the bait.

I bow before the blogging brilliance of Dan Savage. Politicians, especially, should NFWAB.

The man is a homophobe of the highest order; he and his odious wife support discrimination against LGBT people, they’re particularly invested in sustaining the religious stigma against queer people, and Marcus Bachmann makes money torturing vulnerable gays and lesbians—not all of them kids—with false promises of cures and false threats of hell. So here’s a man who thinks people should be discriminated against for being gay… a man who tells Christian gays that God hates people who are gay… and his manner is so stereotypically gay that he wouldn’t look out of place in a gay mens chorus or a sling at Club Z.

As we’ve seen with Haggard, Rekers, Craig, et al, the biggest homophobes are often messy closet cases. And as sex researcher Michael Bailey puts it: Not all gay men are sissies, but nearly all sissies are gay men. So it’s entirely possible—it seems highly likely to me—that Marcus Bachmann is one of those guys who insists that sexual orientation is a choice because he choose to be straight. Or choose to identify as straight.

They have gone for the jugular mocking Bachmann for his own gayness. Just listening to one fo his rants is an OMG! moment.

Gay people who point out how fruity Bachmann is aren’t saying there’s something wrong with being fruity, or with being gay, or with guys who look, speak, walk, or dance the way Bachmann does. A lot of us look, speak, walk, and dance that way. And we don’t think there’s anything wrong with us for looking, speaking, walking, or dancing that way. I’ve never met a gay man who objected to Modern Family‘s Cam, who looks, speaks, walks, and dances the Bachmann way. And we certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with being gay. But Marcus Bachmann sure does. He thinks there’s a whole lot wrong with being gay. And when we point out that this same Marcus Bachmann acts like a huge homo—like a huge, messy, married, dishonest, closeted version Cam—we’re not mocking the fruits. We’re hoisting that pansy with his own hateful petard.

And as sex researcher Michael Bailey puts it: Not all gay men are sissies, but nearly all sissies are gay men. So it’s entirely possible—it seems highly likely to me—that Marcus Bachmann is one of those guys who insists that sexual orientation is a choice because he choose to be straight. Or choose to identify as straight.

“Gay voice”, for the purpose of this post, is the kind of voice other people will perceive as making the speaker more likely to be gay. Obviously, not all gays have it, or anything like it; we are talking about perceptions.

There are a few features to stereotypical gay speech. One is pitch. All things equal, the higher a voice, the more effeminate a voice sounds, for the obvious reasons. The second is pitch variability. The more up and down a voice goes in conversation, the more likely it is to be perceived as “excitable”, feminine and gay in men.

Third is the vowels. A recent paper in American Speech argues that American gay male voices tend towards the vowels of California.

So maybe Bachmann just has a gay accent instead of actually being a closet gay. Then again: